Houses for the Living

6,000 years ago, people began to cultivate the soils of Northern Europe, and with the introduction of agriculture, permanent settlement was adopted. How did these people live, and what was the architecture of their dwellings? This publication will examine the subject.

In 2012, we held a conference about two-aisled houses at the SAXO Institute, University of Copenhagen. The aim of the conference was to establish the current state of affairs in terms of research within this area. It soon became clear that an extensive - and largely unpublished - group of source material, which was of great academic interest, existed in Denmark. It was also clear that what was very much required was to gather and present the most important recent results and perspectives in a national summary. This constitutes the basis of this publication, to which all museums in Denmark with archaeological responsibility have contributed.

The articles have quite surprisingly indicated that hundreds of longhouses have been excavated. The houses share obvious common traits, but also vary considerably. For example, they include both small houses of only 30 m2 and large, almost hall-like houses covering nearly 300 m2.

Today, there are few areas of Denmark where such houses have not been found. This publication presents the remains of over 1,000 two-aisled houses from more than 500 excavations in Denmark, as well as a few excavations in the northernmost part of Germany. However, throughout this area, a more precise chronological and typological grouping of the houses is still lacking. These questions will be examined in this publication, which apart from articles about the houses in the different parts of the country, also contains a complete catalogue of all the known longhouses dating to the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age in Denmark.